The two phases of The Beatles
The two phases of The Beatles
In 1973, three years after the break-up of the Beatles, two compilation albums were released: The Red Album and The Blue Album. The red album contains a collection of the best songs of the 7 albums made between 1962-1966. The blue album contains a collection of the best songs from the 6 albums released between 1967-1970.
An interesting question is, why decided Apple Records to split up the songs in two compilation albums instead of releasing one all-embracing album. According to Mark Steffen[1], the lifetime of the Beatles can be divided into different phases. He calls the time of The Red Album a phase where the songs were “dance songs whose themes were girls and falling in love.” After this phase the Beatles changed, they only wrote songs in the studio, became more individualistic and they grew their hair. The songs in time of The blue Album had a different theme and sound as the group explored many new forms of music. The most famous example is the adding of a sitar in their song.
That the Beatles changed during their lifetime is clear, but was 1967 a clear turning point to split up the two compilation albums? Or is there a better point in time to divide their music?
Used playlists
Songs used shown per album per period
In this plot can be seen that in both periods almost the same number of songs were written. Hover to get the song and album information.
The Red Album
The Blue Album
The Beatles changed over time
Valence, energy and duration over time per album
In this plot you can see the following things:
- Valence (positiveness) per song
- Energy per song
- Duration per song in seconds
The songs are ordered by year and album.
Three interesting things are visable:- It looks like the valence becomes lower over time
- It looks like the energy becomes lower over time
- These two categories become more spread out.
A downward trend in valence and energy visible.
Valence and Energy over time per album.
There is a downward trend visible in valence and energy.
The chroma analysis of Abbey Road song come together.
Chroma analysis of the song come together
The extracted notes are pretty good. The song is written in D-minor, which also is visible in the chroma feature. Also interesting is to see is that mainly D and C# are used a lot in the end of the song. This is correct and part of the outro.
Chordograms and Keygrams don’t like The Beatles
Chordogram of the song come together
When we look at this chordogram, you’ll think the key of this song is C minor or Eb major. The internet disagrees, tabs.ultimate-guitar.com says the key is Dm and also when I play along on the piano, I think Dm is the right key.
Two possible reasons why the results are so bad:- The song doesn’t have a lot of triads.
- The pitch is not based on 440Hz
The last reason is possible because it was harder to tune your instruments in the 60s. Also, the producers speeded the songs which adjusted the key of a song.
A lot of repetition visible in the Come Together Self-Similarity
Self-Similarity Matrix of the song Come Together
In the Self-Similarity Matrix, it is visible that Come Together is a structured song with a lot of repeating parts. Notice that:- The chorus of the song is fairly short, but repeats four times.
- The chorus is also visible at the previous page at the same timestamp
- like in the chroma analysis and the chordogram, the outro is clearly visible and repeats itself a lot.
Different takes of the song Come Together
Dynamic timewarp of two different versions of the song Come Together
The following things are visible:- Repetition, because several diagonal lines are visible. The are spread out over the plot because they changed the structure of the song.
- Homogeneity, because there are a lot of big blocks visible.
In these blocks, you can see the verses that are similar but different because it was sung a little bit different in comparison to the original take.
Lucy’s tempo is all over the place
Tempogram of Lucy in the sky with Diamonds
As you can see and hear, the tempo changes a lot over time. Because that it is interesting to look at the tempo detected in the Spotify features. The detected tempo is 65.09 bpm.
It’s interesting to see Spotify picked this bpm beacuse it’s not an average of the song, but just a random point somewhere during the song.
Conclusion
In the plots, you can see The Beatles changed over time. They started as a band with high energy and valence, but in a few years, they evolved into a more diverse band with songs with high and low energy and high and low valence.
For now, it seems like Apple Records made a good choice dividing the compilation album into two parts. In further work, it would be interesting to look into the evolving of valence in time and to analyze if 1967 was the best splitting point when you look at Spotify’s features.